Monday, February 25, 2013

The Second Time Around (Through page 102)

After many months of struggling to read new fiction—new
to me, ie. fiction I have not yet read—I’ve decided to put everything else
aside and read Infinite Jest from
front to back, again. I read it for the first time about 8 years ago and it’s
haunted me ever since. Every novel I pick up immediately gets compared to it,
and every novel, without fail, falls woefully short of IJ’s brilliance. I’m coming to terms with the very real possibility
that nothing I encounter for the rest of my life will stack up to it, that it
is my one true novelistic love, and that other books will be, at best, mere
distractions or dalliances in between bouts of hardcore cogitation about IJ. So, instead of pretending I want to
do anything else, I’m reading my clear-cut favorite novel for the second time.

Even though this is officially my second time
through, I’m pretty sure I’ve read the whole thing at least once since my first
read, and some sections I know I’ve read 3+ times. It was my coffee table book
for the longest time; when I would eat lunch or have a few minutes to kill, I’d
basically flip to a random section and start reading. There was a time I was
following individual plot threads and reading them in order, eg. Marathe and
Steeply’s confab on the outcropping overlooking Tucson, reading a section,
skipping ahead 50 pages to the next section, etc. But I’ve never read Infinite Jest from page 1 to 981 since
that first time.What follows are some notes about the text as I read
it again: interesting things I notice, observations, discoveries, things like
that. Whatever halfway-interesting thing pops into my head while I’m reading.
Some of this stuff will probably be pretty idiosyncratic and probably not the
sort of general interest stuff you can find in such excellent book-length
analyses as Elegant Complexity, for
example. But while they are mainly for myself, if these notes can be of
interest to other people—especially those already familiar with the text—then
that would be cool, too.

Mainly I’m just excited to be revisiting my favorite
place in the world: the world of Infinite
Jest. Check back periodically as I make my way through it for the 2nd time
(officially).

NOTES

pg. 22/23 – Possible mistake: “Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to
kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on
a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her, his swollen eyes red and
his face sagging so that its slack folds maybe touched, limply, the folds of
her own loose sagging face is it sloshed back and forth on his pillow,
its mouth working dryly.” As?

pg. 53 endnote 5 — It amused/delighted me that I
just knew that the footnote (a.) attached to “Tenuate” would be about Michael
Pemulis, even before directing my eyes downward. Rereading IJ really is how Michael Silverblatt described it: it’s like
getting to know someone well.

pg. 64 endnote 24 — The infamous J.O. Incandenza’s
filmography. When I first read it, this eight page section seemed wondrous, and
I regarded it with that “I can’t believe someone wrote this” kind of awe. It
seemed more transcribed than written, if you know what I mean. However, it was
easy to buy into the argument that it was more than a little extraneous or unnecessary.
Rereading it, its role in the book is almost forehead-slappingly obvious. James
Incandenza was one of those autobiographical artists who make cringingly
personal art. Some of his movies are scenes right out of his life (and the
novel) like It Was a Great Marvel That He
Was in the Father Without Knowing Him (the “professional
conversationalist”, pgs. 27-31). Others fairly well explicate what he at least
thought was happening domestically with his wife’s (imagined?) infidelities ((At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect).
Other films will be described pretty thoroughly as Hal watches them later, eg. Blood Sister: One Tough Nun.

I noticed that he often used P.A. Heaven to narrate
his documentaries. I wondered whether this was because of Heaven’s dulcet
voice, but a quick search of the book revealed this description on page 910:
“Paul Anthony Heaven . . . reading the lecture in the deadening academic
monotone that Himself so loved. The monotone was the reason why Himself used
Paul Anthony Heaven . . . in anything that required a deadening institutional
presence.” A sly joke by Incandenza/Wallace, I’d say.

Another funny bit is noting that his penultimate
finished film, The Film Adaptation of
Peter Weiss’s ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the
Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade’,
which from the description seems like a compendium of all Incandenza’s
neuroses, is followed by three unfinished and unreleased films entitled Too Much Fun, The Unfortunate Case of Me,
Sorry All Over the Place, as if Himself was trying to apologize to whomever
was hurt by The Film Adaptation...,
both emotionally and physically (the film was unreleased partly due to
“HOSPITALIZATION”).

A final note: As a Paul Thomas Anderson fan, I
couldn’t help noticing this entry in J.O.I.’s filmography: Let There Be Lite. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Documentary
cast w/ narrator Ken N. Johnson; 16mm; 50 minutes(?)’ black and white; silent
w/ narration. Unfinished documentary on genesis of reduced-calorie bourbon
industry.

pg. 76 — “She now went through a series of
expressions that made it clinically impossible for the doctor to determine
whether or not she was entirely sincere. She looked either pained or trying
somehow to express hilarity.” Sounds similar to Hal in the opening scene. I
suppose it’s this line that lends credence to the theory that Hal is going
through pot withdrawal in the Year of Glad.

pg. 78/79 — Possible mistake: “And just before
0145h. on 2 April Y.D.A.U., his wife arrived back home and uncovered her hair
and came in and saw the Near Eastern medical attaché and his face and tray and
eyes and the soiled condition of his special recliner, and rushed to his side
crying his name aloud, touching his head, trying to get a response, failing to
get any response to her, he still staring straight ahead; and eventually and
naturally she—noting that the expression on his rictus of a face nevertheless appeared
very positive, ecstatic, even, you could say—she eventually and naturally
turning her head and following his line of sight to the cartridge-viewer.”
I’d say that either the semicolon should be a comma, or, more likely, it should
read “she eventually and naturally turned her head and followed his line of
sight to the cartridge-viewer.” (Semicolons should separate two independent
clauses.) The distended antanaclasis is a DFW trademark, and this one might
have gotten the better of him.

pg. 83 — “Mario’s thinking-hard expression resembles
what for another person would be the sort of comically distorted face made to
amuse an infant.” Another case where someone’s outward appearance belies what
the owner of the expression feels. Is this just an all-too-human situation?

pg. 84 — “Schtitt then falls into the sort of
silence of someone who’s enjoying mentally rewinding and replaying what he just
came up with.” F. Scott Fitzgerald being the only other writer I’ve read as
ex-/intensively as DFW (well, maybe Salinger, too), this line made me think of The Beautiful and Damned, pg. 21:
“Maury: (still considering his own last
observation) I remember.”

pg.88, endnote 39 — Endnote 304 is a doozy. You are
directed there in a footnote to endnote 39. James Struck is writing a paper on Canadian
terrorist groups for one of his classes (History of Canadian Unpleasantness),
mostly plagiarizing an obscure scholarly article. Wallace has a blast skewering
the article’s “Academese,” an article written by Geoffrey Day, whose spoken
words, we will later learn, have just as much power to annoy as the ones he indites.
Solecistic howlers abound: “prominent, Canadian hearts”; “thin, double tracks”;
“i.e., that is”; “comprised largely or perhaps even entirely of”; “among the
male offspring of asbestos, nickel and zinc miners”; “geatalt”; and a healthy
dose of “prior to”s, which we know incurred DFW’s opprobrium from this popular YouTube video. (It can probably safely be assumed that the narrator of this
section is different from the other (main?) one who has no compunction labeling
a lot of this stuff with “[sic].”)
There is also a lot of comedy with Struck going through the mental cartwheels of
adapting this stuff for his term paper, initially trying to change it enough to
avoid the charge of plagiarism but eventually throwing up his hands and copying
whole sections verbatim.

Like the filmography, a lot of this seems
superfluous on the first read-through, but it actually contains a lot of vital
information about Canadian terrorists groups, especially the A.F.R., which will
tie in significantly with the subplot involving Marathe. Wallace also slyly
throws in a reference to “Bernard Wayne,” who we can assume is related to John
Wayne in some way, as they both come from the family of an asbestos miner. That
this also flies over Struck’s head—“Disastrously, Stuck blithely transposes
this stuff too, with not even a miniature appliance-size bulb flickering
anywhere over his head”—induces a chuckle.

pg.
90 — Possible mistake: “ ‘A person with no political value to anybody except
that the Saudi Ministry of Entertainment made one the hell of a shrill
stink.’ ” Omit the “the”? Unless it’s some dialectal variant of the more
commonly used expression, used by people in the Southwest U.S., where Steeply
is apparently from? For whatever it’s worth, it was “corrected” to “one hell of
a shrill stink” in the unfairly maligned audio book.pg.
100 — Puzzling irregularity: “ ‘I’m waiting til the last second to even
breathe. I’m not expanding the cage till driven by necessity of air.’ ” Whoever
says this is thinking the word is “til” in one sentence and in the very next
sentence is thinking it’s the more correct “till.”pg.
101 — “…Hal is the only extant Incandenza who looks in any way ethnic…Hal is
sleek, sort of radiantly dark, otterish, only slightly tall, eyes blue but
darkly so, and unburnable even w/o sunscreen, his untanned feet the color of
weak tea, his nose ever unpeeling but slightly shiny. His sleekness isn’t oily
so much as moist, milky; Hal worries secretly that he looks half-feminine…Hal’s
eldest brother Orin had got the Moms’s Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype, the
deep-socketed and lighter-blue eyes, the faultless posture and incredible
flexibility (Orin was the only male anybody at E.T.A.’d ever heard of who could
do a fully splayed cheerleader-type split), the rounder and more protrusive
zygomatics.”I’m
trying this second time around to really see the characters in my head the way
they are described. All too often, I’ll substitute my own visual version of the
characters for what is actually written in a book I’m reading. I’ve talked to
some of my friends who say they have the same problem. For whatever reason, we
sometimes just throw out physical descriptions, unless we perceive them to be
integral to the story. Take Hal, for instance. I’ve always thought of him as staunchly
Caucasian, almost as white as can be. This is not correct, and going forward my
mental picture of him will be duly corrected so to be better aligned with the
text.pg. 102 — “Every jr.
player presently in this room is ranked in the top 64 continentally, except
Pemulis, Yardley and Blott.” Omission of the serial comma here…significant? It’s
doubtful that Hal would make this mistake. Is this observation from a different
characters perspective? (I would say that the use of “presently” to mean “currently”
is also un-Hal-like if Hal hadn’t used it on page 4.)